Leemtech ICT Solutions

leemtech ict solutions

Thursday, 14 April 2016

As it is said first impression is the last impression, first
experience of a user with your website makes first and important
impression of your business, quality and brand.When you're building a new website, or working to make your existing
site the best that it can be, use this checklist of 10 Qualities of a
Good Website to ensure your site will be attractive, solid and visible :

1. Original and fresh Content

"Content is King". The more relevant and updated content your website have, more will be its usability.

Good quality content provides the information user is looking for.

2. User Friendly Naviagtion

A good site navigation is like a GPS that helps user find the relevant content out of your website.

If your website has a lot of content, provide a search box so visitors can quickly find what they are looking for.

Keep your navigation consistent from page to page to avoid any possible confusion.

3. Simple and Professional Design

A good website should have an automatically attracts user's eyes. Be
sure the colors used should contrast well and your text doesn't require
a magnifying glass to read.

With every design element added, take a step back and make sure it
serves a purpose and does not detract from the usability of the site.

Breaking up text into subheads and bullet points will improve the layout of the page and make the text more scannable.

4. Speed

How many seconds will user needs to wait for a page to load before they give up and leave a website

Coding, number of graphics, the server speed, traffic volume on the
website and the capabilities of a user's computer affects the speed of
the website.

5. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO stands for "search engine optimization". SEO is a technique
which helps search engines(like google,yahoo,bing) find and rank your
site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search
query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

SEO is one of the most commonly neglected aspects of a website, but a website is useless if no one can find it.

Use keywords in titles, meta tags, headings, file names and in the content of your site.

6. Compatible on Different Browser

A good website should work properly on all popular web browsers like
Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer. Old
versions of Internet Explorer (like IE7, IE8) are considered a headache
for a developer as they behave abnormally for the normal code.

A good website also gives a consistent experience on all above listed browsers.

7. Functionality

All the elements of your site should work seamlessly. You need to
fix all the page errors and poorly constructed website elements.

A poorly built website can severely affect negatively to the performance of your business.

8. Keep your target audience in mind

Think about the people who would be interested in visiting your Web site.

If you are designing a website about men wears, the site should have
a masculine feel to it. Decorating the page with pink hearts and roses
would not be a good idea!

9. Point of Contact or Feedback form

It is considered a good practice for a website to have a Contact Us Form so that user can drop his considerations and queries.

It is also considered a good practice for a website to have a Feedback Form too so that user can his valuable observations/feedback about the website.

10. Tracking

A nice tool like Google Analytics will keep track of the number of
people who come to your website, what pages they viewed, where they came
from, what keywords they used in search engines, how many left after
the first page and more.

Unlike other media, websites can be easily tracked to see what is
working and what isn't. This data will help you to improve the quality
and structure of your site.

Sunday, 22 November 2015

The offer for website services on the Internet is overwhelming
nowadays. You know you need a website, but how to select the right
developer or provider for you? Is there any criteria you can follow to
discriminate between all the different services you can find online? In
this post we try to outline a few simple considerations you should bear
in mind while “shopping” for websites.

Security

As discussed previously here and here,
setting up a nice looking website, with the correct tools such as for
example a CMS system like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress and pre-made
graphical templates, is a quick and easy task, once you are setup.
Everybody with some basic skills can do it, these tools are so user
friendly today. What is generally overlooked by beginners is that
keeping up and running such a system requires solid maintenance and a
fair amount of work. Because they are so widespread, they are favorite
targets for hackers. If a vulnerability comes out, which happens
regularly, the thousands of installations of the particular version are
at risk and require updating or patching. Updates and patches are indeed
regularly released by the groups who develop these systems. How many
site administrators regularly update their sites with the latest
releases? Lots of them, maybe the majority. However a certain
percentage, that include people that pretend to sell professional sites either
simply don’t do it, or they don’t do it on a regular basis and do not
have a constant update strategy ongoing. This puts their websites (and
yours, if they developed and host the site for you) at great risk of
being hacked. The consequences of this can go beyond loosing your
website. We did put security as first point, as without security there
is no web site online, plain and simple. Only problems.

Contents Management and Updates

A website is usually born as an empty box. It comes with an home
page, some graphical elements, a logo, navigation menu(s), possibly some
sections/categories of contents and maybe some empty pages in the
various sections. Since an empty site generally does not look nice, it
is not unusual that the pages are filled up with some arbitrary text,
like the famous “Lorem Ipsum” (here’s a free lorem ipsum generator,
should you need it). The fact that somebody has to fill up the initial
contents and then update these contents when required, is often
overlooked, given for granted or simply not considered by the client.
Still, contents have to be inserted and managed.
Many considerations are relevant here. First, will the contents change
in time? How much, if so? Many showcase sites have relatively static
contents and once the initial contents are inserted in the pages, the
need for updates is fairly limited. This is a good case, where the
concern about the easy of contents updates is limited. Your
provider/webmaster can probably do it for you, when required, with
limited work and costs.
If on the other hand, there is a frequent requirement of changing/adding
new contents and pages, the issue becomes relevant and should be
considered upfront, before starting the construction of the site. How
easy is the editing of existing pages, the creation of new
pages/sections, the linking of those new contents into the navigation
framework of the site can vary enormously across the different ways to
build and manage a web site. Do not take for granted that your pages
contents will be easy to edit with no technical knowledge.
If you will need to make frequent changes and add contents yourself, you
will need a web site with an administrative backend where you can login
and edit contents with ease. You do not want to mess up with html
pages, FTP file uploads and stuff like this. Even if you are skilled and
could do it. In the long run, a Content Management System is far better
and let you concentrate on the contents, not on the tech aspects of the
web site. Of course the use of a CMS comes with overheads (see point
1), but if well managed it is worth it.

Pleasing the eye: web site graphics

Maybe you have some basic skills in html/css and know how to open an
hosting account, register a domain name and put up a simple web page.
Does this qualifies you as a webmaster? Well, yes indeed. If you want to
setup a personal website, or a website for friends and family, fine.
Are you a professional webmaster then? Ehm, sorry, no. Setting up a
beautiful web site with a consistent navigation framework requires
experience. Designing website graphics is a specialized job that comes
with his own set of skills, distinct from the web coding skills. As all
artistic skills, it conjugates personal inclinations and sensibility
with technical knowledge of some specialized software tools required to
generate a professional graphics.
If your goal is to get to a professionally designed, gorgeous web site
(and indeed this is where you should aim for a great and competitive
online presence, even for a simple showcase web site), you should
definitely use a design produced by a professional web designer. But
wait a minute, won’t this be horribly expensive? The answer to this is
articulated. First of all, how do you define horribly expensive. You
have to relate the costs to the expected benefits of your online
presence. If you are a freelance, mostly working “offline”, and all you
need is a “business card” website, where you contact information is
posted, and you are generally on a tight budget, then the threshold for
“horribly” will be low. If on the other hand you run a purely online
business, say an online shop, a great graphics could have a dramatic
impact on sales (for sure, an ugly graphics and poor navigation WILL
have a strong impact on sales). In this case your threshold should be
significantly higher.
The other important thing to consider is that you have a choice between
hiring a professional to make a new custom design for you ex-novo
(significantly expensive) or using a non-exclusive professionally
designed commercial or free template, that may be customized for your
needs. This second option can be one order of magnitude cheaper than the
custom design option, and the result will possibly be equally great.
The difference is that in the second case, your layout/design will not
be unique on the web, there might be similar sites around. This
similarity will be greatly limited if your webmaster is able to
customize the color scheme and other relevant aspects of the web site
for you.
Which way to go will depend also on what we are going to discuss next: set an appropriate budget.

Set an appropriate budget

In my webmaster career, I very often find the idea, in clients, that
websites should be inexpensive. After all, as we said, there is an
overwhelming offer of websites, on and offline, and sometimes these are
offered really, really cheap. So if you can get a web site for very
little, why should you get the same (a web site), by spending the
horrible (here we are, again) amount of money that some
providers/designers try to charge? The answer is that although you think
you are getting the same (a web site), this is not the case. Here are
some points to consider:

Does the person/group offering the website have a proven
record-track of keeping several websites online for a significan amount
of time?

Where will be your site hosted? Will you have a solid, professional
hosting or does your provider uses some cheap/bulk hosting services?

Are site backups performed regularly?

Does your provider has the skills to act on unexpected
events/security breach? Is he professionally organized to deal with
emergencies?

Will your site have a professional design and a consistent navigation framework? This is different from just “looking good”

Who will care about contents management and updates? Is this you?
Which tools will your provider give you to do that? Or will the contents
be managed by your webmaster? Are there additional costs for this?

Is your webmaster available in real time for support? How can you
contact him? What are the average response times? What is the quality of
the support you are getting? Can you contact your webmaster by phone in
case of emergencies, or is it just an e-mail or web form-based
interaction?

If you need to make a change, to request a special feature, will
your webmaster be able to deliver? Or is he just an average web guy with
some basic skills? How much will your webmaster’s skills allow you to
modulate your online presence in time, grow, add features, make changes?
This is not something that you necessarily know when you “buy your web
site”, yet these are things you should consider carefully. Who is
selling you the website, what do you know about his experience and
skills?

As you see, the idea that a website is just a web site is extremely
misleading. A website should be considered as a project. To be
successful in a project you want to team up with the right people. The
more complex and “important” the web site, the more it becomes essential
that you get a skilled webmaster to do the job. And skills are not
free: set an appropriate budget, instead of going for the (apparently)
cheaper option. Going cheap has costs involved.

Carefully plan your navigation tree and navigation framework

A standard setup for navigation is that from each single page of the website you should be able to:

go up one level (reach the parent section/page, if any)

access the level(s) below

Access the “siblings” pages within the same section

return to the home page

Each of these navigation options should have a distinct look, and
keep this look and positioning across the whole web site so that the
visitor soon feels at home while browsing your site. Be consistent and
predictable. This is to be avoided in may situations of life, but it is a
good thing while implementing a navigation framework.
This is a minimal, but sufficient setup in most cases, that should not
be difficult to accomplish. Yet, there are plenty of websites that seem
to lack even this basic navigation framework. Ensure that your website
will not be one of those, be kind to your visitors (and they will be
kind to you – they might decide to ignore you, you know?).
The sections hierarchy is important and should be carefully planned, as already discussed here.

First impact: the home page

Many (far from all though!) of your visitors might enter your website
from the home page. Together with the sections and subsections design,
planning the various elements that will populate the home page of your
site is one of the first things to consider, before starting
development. Here is a tentative list of things you might consider
including. None is really essential, and you could decide to think
entirely out of the box here. Some elements might be missing. Here you
go, anyway:

Logo

Site name (can be in the logo)

Site slogan (can be in the logo), a short sentence, a few words
about your site. Mind that text in the images cannot be read by search
engines, so consider carefully what you have to do to optimise your
search engine popularity here. If you use images, be sure to use (or to
have your webmaster use) ALT tags generously.

A paragraph of text describing what your
website/business/activity/project is about. Again, great for search
engines and for your visitors aswell, don’t keep them guessing too much.
Did I already mention that they could decide to ignore you?

Navigation menu(s), see point 5 above

A news box and/or important event box? Maybe to be activated or
deactivated depending on the availability of events or more in general,
things to point out.

A website footer. The contents are up to you. They could typically
be links to “secondary/service” pages such as “contact us” or “site
map”, copyright statements, credits etc..

You should consider that the contents of the header (logo, slogan,
top bar navigation menu) and footer, maybe with some variations, might
well be displayed over your entire web site, in each single page. They
are important elements to be designed with care.

Frequently updated contents: should I have a news section? A user’s forum? A BLOG?

It is great to have an highly interactive web site full of updated
contents, where users contribute by posting material and comments. On
the other hand, nothing is more sad and desolated than a forum with 2
posts and one reply, that remain online, with no additions, for years.
The truth is, starting a community is not easy, it requires work,
planning, great initial contents. So if you plan to start a forum, be
ready. Unfortunately your forum is competing with many other forums,
twitter, facebook etc.. Do not underestimate this.
Concerning the news section. Again this is very nice but requires work,
unless it is somehow automated (great but less selected and targeted, of
course). Who is doing this work? Will you? The next sadder thing after
an empty forum, is a news box whose last news if from two years ago.
Much better to either automate, or avoiding the news box to start with.
In short, put up interactive and frequently updated sections on solid
grounds, not just because they are cool and look nice at the launch of
the web site. They get old and sad soon if you do not maintain them and
work on them regularly.
If you have a showcase website you do not want to work on too much, keep
it simple and clean, it will do his job nicely without unnecessary
bells and whistles. If on the other hand the website is central to your
business, and his success is your success, then definitely work on
interactive and dynamic sections as they are a great added value.

Who is visiting? Don’t remain in the dark

Where do your visitors come from? How do they come to your site
(specific search engines queries, links from other web sites)? How many
visitors come to your site each day? What do they do while on the site,
how many pages on average do they visit? Which are the most visited
pages? All these questions should have an answer in order for you to get
the feel of how the site is performing, how to make it better and
attract more visitors, how to change and adapt the navigation flow so as
to keep the users on the site longer.
You should make sure your site has a good web site visits tracking
software in order to address these issues. One of the best systems in
this respect is google analytics. If your website is central to your
activity, consider getting an account (or make sure your webmaster is
signed up) and start tracking visits to your website in a professional
way. Even a quick periodic analysis of the data can provide valuable
insights on what is your website for your visitors. Don’t remain be
blinded by what YOU think your site is for them. See the real thing and
act accordingly.

Your website and search engines: SEO

If your website never show up in search engines results, whatever the
keywords, then you are on the good path for irrelevance. For your site
to impact and be meaningful, you need visitors, and in average
situations (if you do nat have alternative traffic driving strategies in
place, say a regular mailing list) most of them will come from search
engines. How many times your navigation starts by opening your favorite
search engine, in search of something you need to know or are looking
for?
You should select some keywords relevant to your activity and set the
goal of being visible on search engines, for these keywords, at a decent
position. A decent position means the first page of results, anything
below this have a poor chance of being visited. We cannot discuss the
techniques and strategies involved here, we will have future posts on
this topic. However you should be aware this is a very important aspect
to consider while planning and building a new web site. Make sure you
hire a webmaster well aware about the importance of Search Engine
Optimization (SEO). If this aspect is crucial for you, consider
consulting with a SEO professional. With the growth of Internet and the
economical and business implications, SEO has become a science on his
own in the last years.

Content wins, always

Visitors come to web sites for their own interest, not because they
like you and want to please you by visiting your web site. It’s about
them, their needs and interests, not yours. They don’t really care about
your website, they care about them. Give them what they want, provide
VALUE for them by offering relevant contents, this is why they are
coming. Did I mention that they could easily decide to ignore you? I am
always amazed on visting web sites that lack the most elementary
information I came to the site for in the first place. So you own a
restaurant. I love all the photos you want to show me, it’s great to
know that the chef is your wife and that you have three happy kids. But
for heaven’s sake, WHAT IS YOUR PHONE NUMBER SO THAT I CALL CALL AND
MAKE A RESERVATION. Not in the “about us”. Not in the “contacts”, where
you just have your e-mail. So I will just ignore you. This is a very
simple example but make the point. Offer the expected contents,
generously and well accessible and organized. Be predictable. It pays

This is the truth.. When a website is developed for you you should own it. Its your property and you should get all the administrative passwords and username. This is what we do . After we develop your website we take you through a free training session on how to manage and update your site and we hand over all the back-end and Cpanel details. Don't be conned by being told you have to contact your developer every time you you want to update your website. Our samples of websites we have done include: www.jumbokidskenya.com,www.thikacollegeofbanking.ac.ke, www.fociekenya.org/home, www.leemtechsolutions.co.ke/gwscc, www.leemtechsolutions.co.ke/chem(in progress) among others. We will come to your premises for a discussion and collection of details. We have our office in Thika Town Witeithie House 3rd Floor room 310. We are mobile so we attend you from your location. Contact us today for a a website at Kshs 7,000 only. Call us on 0718 505 030 / 0721 927 106 or 0786 722 343 or visit our website for more details: www.leemtechsolutions.co.ke

Saturday, 4 July 2015

Responsive design is a web design and development technique that creates a site or system that reacts to the size of a user’s screen. Responsive design will optimise a user’s browsing experience by creating a flexible and responsive web page, optimised for the device that is accessing it.

There has been a distinct audience shift towards mobile browsing and responsive

Increasing your reach to tablet and mobile audiences

Increasing use of the internet and proliferation of web applications on tablet and mobile devices has been the driving force behind this development. Traditionally users would be re-directed to a device specific site (e.g. mobile), but responsive design means one site can be implemented across devices.

Tablet sales are expected to exceed 100 million this year, meaning that responsive design has never been so important for those looking to optimise their online content. Indeed, some Byte9 sites are already experiencing up to 40% traffic from tablet and mobile devices, a strong commercial imperative to accommodate the smaller screen size in a unified design.

Increase sales and conversion rates

Another benefit of responsive design is that the user has an improved site experience as there is no need for redirection, use of standardised Style Sheets (CSS) across devices and unified design approach will also create a consistent look and feel. Consistent user experience will have a positive impact on your conversion rates as people are familiar with navigation and site or system use across devices. Responsive design removes some of the barriers that having multiple sites can present, i.e. in functionality, performance and consistent look and feel.

Consolidate your analytics and reporting

A single responsive site means that you no longer have to track user journeys, conversion paths, funnels and redirections between your sites. Site analytics tools like Google Analytics are now optimised to handle multiple devices and responsive reporting. All of your tracking and analytics will continue to function and be condensed into a single report, allowing for easier monitoring and analysis.

Increase your visibility in search engines

Responsive Design means you can manage one website with a single set of hypertext links; therefore reducing the time spent maintaining your site. This allows you to focus on link outreach with a consolidated Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. SEO campaigns can be time consuming and costly, but by creating a responsive site, all of your efforts can be focussed on a single site, with unified strategy and tactics across devices.

Content is vital in SEO, good quality content which is regularly released improves your search engine ranking page positioning, therefore a further advantage of responsive design is that fewer resources can be wasted in low-level duplication of content across sites, the content need only be applied to a single site, increasing your chances or a higher search engine ranking.

Additionally Google suggest (which Byte9 analytics can confirm) that mobile optimised, responsive sites are featuring prominently in localised search results. This is obviously of huge significance to high street and online retailers, amongst other burgeoning mobile use cases.

Save time and cost on mobile development

A primary benefit of adopting a responsive design is that it takes less time than creating an additional stand-alone mobile site, which has been the traditional approach. Testing across a number of websites also increases your development, support and maintenance overhead. As styles are re-used and optimised by device standardised testing methodologies can also be used.

Save time and cost on site management

Clients will also find it much easier and less time consuming to manage and maintain a single site, with much less content to manage. Additionally a single administrative interface can easily be optimised, using layout and workflow tools to manage the correct content, or site templates that are being used for different devices. Business logic can be applied such that the overall multi-device experience can be significantly enhanced within a single administration, like Blaze CMS.

Within Blaze CMS, for example, editorial users are marshalled to produce the requisite content, appropriate for each device screen size, therefore maximising the benefit and minimising what can be a huge editorial administrative overhead with separate sites for mobile.

Enhance user's offline browsing experience

Responsive design allows site owners to deliver quality content to audiences across devices, the offline browsing capabilities of HTML5 mean that sites can be easily accessed ‘on the go’. As HTML5 enabled tablets and smart phones proliferate this will become increasingly important. Email newsletters, and content contained in hybrid HTML5 web applications will increasingly be consumed on the move and in the absence of an internet connection.

Conclusion

Responsive design allows you to stay ahead of the trend. As the demand for media rich mobile internet and apps is burgeoning, several important implications must be addressed; development and maintenance costs, visibility in search engines and better conversion rates. It is these factors combined with a unified approach to design that will be beneficial for all stakeholders.

With the increase in Tablet sales and smartphone device use exploding, responsive design is key to keeping up ahead of your competitors and establishing market share; content consumption on mobile devices will only continue to balloon as 2013 progresses.

The difference between black hat and white hat SEO relates to the specific techniques used when trying to improve the search engine ranking of a website or web page.Search engine optimization or SEO is the process by which volume and quality of traffic to a web site can be improved. The higher ranked a site is higher on the search engine results pages (SERP), the more visitors the website naturally gets. Owing to the rising importance of search engines like Google, SEO is a much sought-after internet marketing strategy. Search engines determine their rankings through propreitary algorithms that are secret and closely guarded. However, these algorithms are based on certain well-known principles. Search engine optimization seeks to apply these principles to improve search ranking. The difference between black hat and white hat SEO relates to what techniques are used when applying these principles.Black hat SEO refers to attempts to improve rankings in ways that are not approved by search engines and involve deception. They go against current search engine guidelines. White hat SEO refers to use of good practice methods to achieve high search engine rankings. They comply with search engine guidelines. (Click the link below for more details)http://www.diffen.com/differ…/Black_Hat_SEO_vs_White_Hat_SEO

Are you looking for some love… from Google? Other than buying paid traffic through their AdWords program, the best way to get more traffic from them is through search engine optimization. But before you start optimizing your site, the first thing you should do is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (GWT).

GWT is a free toolset provided by Google that helps you first understand what’s going on with your website. This way you make decisions based off of data instead of going in blindly.

About Leemtech Ict Solutions

We are a
group of professional programmers, web designers, database developers,
engineers, graphics editors, ICT trainers and support team who are ready
to listen and solve your needs according to your specifications. We use
the best tools, latest programming languages and frameworks. We have
dedicated ourselves to solve all our clients’ needs, we offer free
support services for our products and our prices are friendly.